


Addendum

by enmity



Category: Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu | Legend of the Galactic Heroes
Genre: Alluded Abuse, F/M, Gen, Post-Anime, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2020-09-17
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:15:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26503501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enmity/pseuds/enmity
Summary: In the end no one had come for her.
Relationships: Elfriede von Kohlrausch/Oskar von Reuenthal
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	Addendum

In the end no one had come for her. An Imperial woman, lost and wandering the streets of Heinessen with only the clothes clinging to her back, but her name was unknown to the people she bumped into, and her past less interesting; having no shortage of the abandoned and suffering to watch over, her face was anonymous to the streetlights and the indifferent windows of crumbling skyscrapers, and she passed by the masses, dazed but safely invisible, as though it were her who was the ghost and not him.

Even in treason, even in death, with his body unceremoniously buried in a traitor’s plot, the man still found a way to taint the world of the living. Elfriede thought so long as he clung like shadows or poison in the memories of the people left behind it might as well be that he’d never passed on at all. She would know. Had it not been for the safe future he’d entrusted his child to she'd resigned herself to understanding this was just another price she’d turn out to pay to see him fall, and it was only after the fact that she remembered he hadn’t deigned to ask her if it had all been worth it; she was glad if not thankful, for she wouldn’t have trusted her answer if she’d forced herself to look him in the eye and open her mouth, just for the sake of a rebuttal. No, she wouldn’t, and she hadn’t.

There was no need to worry about such things now though. The dead was dead. Coming to terms was a privilege restricted to the living. Staring at the ceiling of his bedroom her mind had wandered to her relatives, the dead cousins and uncles and the women wasting themselves away at the penal colony, and the thought hadn’t been a comfort then, but it was even less so now that he was dead and gone and she no longer carried the laughable hope that news of his defeat would somehow reach through space and distance and the dirt of the shallow graves she’d watched her family being buried in—that somehow they would hear and rejoice in her stead and everything lost would be miraculously made up for.

None of that had happened. But by setting aside the gun and walking out the door of his office she had denied him the last word by another means: she had lived on.

That was her thought as she took the hand Dominique Saint-Pierre extended to her. Together they walked on, secrets shouldered and smothered into silence, and Elfriede told herself in time she would learn not to duck her head at the sight of this bright, brilliant sunset; it was too lovely a color to waste on weeping over a prideful bastard’s spilled blood.

**Author's Note:**

> [roieru](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17100998)... again 
> 
> It's been years since I was a teen watching LOGH (yikes) but roieru was and is lifechanging still... I focused plenty on Elfriede's misery back when I was younger, but now I like to think there's something to be said about how she got to live on, and that this is a possible outcome for her, as optimistic as it is.


End file.
